


Standing Appointment

by PositivelyVexed



Category: The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: Blow Jobs, Boot Worship, Breathplay, Bruises, Cock Slapping, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Rimming, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 00:23:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18457676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/pseuds/PositivelyVexed
Summary: Chris Mannix is the sheriff of Red Rock. Major Warren has some bounties for him.





	Standing Appointment

**Author's Note:**

  * For [linndechir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/linndechir/gifts).



Major Warren must have thought he was being funny. There was no call for it, the special pleasure he took in riling up a man who had saved his life, and the honest-to-God, hand-on-the-Bible sheriff of Red Rock still wasn’t sure how he’d got to the point where he got a jolt of something like excitement when he heard those damn spurs clinking along on the way to his door. How Major Warren’d managed to have the most distinctive sounding spurs in Wyoming, he didn’t know either. But somehow, no matter how many days he’d been riding, his spurs managed to stay clean and shiny as fresh polished silver, and jingled along the planks to the sheriff’s office, and he’d feel a heat in his belly he didn’t like to think on too hard. Then Major Warren would stride through the door, dragging some dead bastard behind him.

Major Warren wasn’t subtle about the kind of man he chose to turn into the sheriff of Red Rock. The lack of subtlety was part of the joke. Maybe it not being funny was even part of the joke too. Who knew, with him.

Today was a bastard Major Warren’d hunted down all the way out in the Dakotas, and carted behind him getting smellier by the day, all so he could slap that scraggly-bearded sonofabitch down on the floor of Chris Mannix’s office with a big wide grin on his face. A couple of townspeople peered curiously through the door, craning their necks and holding their nose as they took in the three of them: the sheriff in a Confederate general’s coat, the major in union blues, and the dead sonofabitch, still wearing tattered rebel grey and a slouch hat.

It was downright disrespectful, was what it was.

The trouble was, Chris had to bear the knowledge that he was the one who had invited Major Warren back in the first place.

Chris had been hobbling around Red Rock for two weeks with a busted leg and a busted tin star (‘it took a bullet when the last sheriff was gunned down, and we only had the one,” the mayor said sheepishly as he pinned it on his chest) by the time Warren decided he was good to ride out again. Chris had sauntered into the stable as the major was gearing up. His gait was still a bit stiff, and Major Warren seemed to know who it was as soon as the triple-tempo of cane and steps sounded behind him.

“What do you want, Chris Mannix?” he asked. Didn’t bother turning around, and certainly didn’t do anything that might have shown respect for the new office, called him by his proper title. Only Chris was polite enough to do that, or treasonous enough, depending on how you looked at it.

“To see you off, of course, major,” said Chris.

Major Warren lifted his shoulders.  “Well, you seen me.”

Same sour company he’d been since their asses had been dragged down off that mountain, not that Chris had really expected otherwise on that score. The major simply wasn’t the kind of company worth having. Bloody man with a bloody history, a treacherous liar out only for himself. He was everything Chris had fought to protect his people from. The kind of specter his daddy could have—hell, had—used to whip a whole damn army into a frenzy. Any town would be better off seeing the back of him.

So Chris should have said so long. Or shot him, like his daddy surely would have done. Should have done anything other than what he did, which was stand there with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, watching Major Warren check his saddlebags, as he dug a small hole in the straw with his toe.

“You swinging by again sometime?”

“You the visitation committee and not just the sheriff now too?”

Chris shrugged, leaned up against the stall. Major Warren’s sure, strong fingers worked away at the straps without missing a beat. No lingering injuries there.

Major Warren checked the guns beside his saddle, and Chris spared a glance at the figure he cut, all decked out. He’d paid someone with some of that leftover bounty money to go up and find his coat, scrub all the blood out of it, and whoever’d done it had done a fine job. He’d bought himself new cavalry pants from somewhere, too, and shined up his boots real nice till they shone. It occurred to Chris, uncomfortably, that Major Warren wore that uniform real well.

It didn’t mean anything. It was like complimenting the Lincoln Letter: Chris didn’t have to respect the thing itself to respect that Warren knew how to make it look good.

Watching that coat kept him transfixed for a second, before Chris frowned and shifted his gaze to the straw in the stable. “Major, now, I know a man who cuts a bloody path like you through the world probably don’t get too many invitations back to a place, but this is what you call a friendly gesture.”

Major Warren fixed him with a patient look that showed he wasn’t feeling patient at all. Chris didn’t much like being inspected by the major, since he had some unnatural way of making him feel seen through. Which was bullshit. Chris was the one who saw through him, not the other way around.

“That ain’t much of a star,” the Major said, eyes drifting down to his chest.

“It’s the star of the genuine sheriff of Red Rock. That's what matters.”

Major Warren snorted. “If Red Rock wants to go handing out official positions to every asshole hillbilly willing to make the thousand-mile journey, I ain’t gonna stop them. But that ain’t much of a star, and you ain’t much of a sheriff, and this really ain’t much of a town, you get right down to it, so I don’t expect to pass back this way any time soon.”

Ungrateful bastard. “Well. I should have known you weren’t much for forgiveness, but I’d have thought we could set politics at the town limits this once. I’m willing to let bygones be bygones if you are.”

“Our bygones ain’t remotely comparable, Chris.”

It galled Chris, the Major getting up on his high horse, acting like he was so much better than him, although not half as galling as the funny way he had of making Chris wonder, briefly, if he maybe he was right. The Major just had that way about him. Maybe it was because he was a damn good liar. Or because he was the unreasonably demanding sort, and that reminded him of his daddy, who always was good at making Chris feel like whatever he said was right.

But the major seemed to notice he had gotten under Chris’s skin. He led his horse around and pinned Chris in with her flank, got himself right up on Chris, with Chris pushed up against the the stable wall, boards digging into his back. Those leather gloved hands up on either side of Chris’s head, pinning him in.  _Fuck_  generosity, if the major was going to be like this, he thought, heart pounding.

“Since you asked so nice, maybe I will be seeing you one of these days. Just because you asked. Just because you’re so willing to set old loyalties aside.” Gave him a pat on the shoulder about as reassuring as a knife in the dark, then dropped his arm and went back to leading his horse outside. Waved one hand at Chris as he put his foot in the stirrup and swung himself up on his horse. “So long, white boy.”

 

\---

 

It didn’t taken a detective to guess that if Major Warren came back, it wouldn’t be in a way Chris would like.

So Chris knew to be a little wary when the Major swung by again only a couple months later, riding in with a body tied on the back of the horse. He moved slow and casual down the street, tipped his hat courteously to every white woman and man walking by with wide eyes.

As he approached, Chris got his first eyeful of the dead bounty, a tall man with a shock of red hair and beard down to his chest.

Chris sighed, pushed up off the porch where he’d been leaning, hand on his holster. There weren’t so many redheaded men on the wanted posters in Chris’s office, and he could recognize from here Melville Toomey, late of Alabama’s 41st, wanted in Colorado for horse thieving and in Missouri for lighting up a Freedman’s Bureau office. Still, bounty wasn’t too big in Wyoming, and most men wouldn’t have bothered when there was more profitable bastards about to shoot in the back. Most men weren’t the Major, though.

Major Warren came down off his horse.

“Help me with this body, would you?” he called out.

Chris put on a smile—foolish and easy, like he really was too stupid to see what Major Warren was trying to do—and went out to meet him. For all that the Major acted like Chris didn’t have a brain in his head, he must have known Chris was smart enough to interpret a damn pointed gesture. Sending messages through bodies was something Chris’s daddy had known how to do too, he sure did, and Chris considered himself as versed in the language as anyone.

After they scrambled together getting the body on the ground, Chris took his time holding up the wanted poster, checking and rechecking the picture to make sure he was the right man, because he knew that’d piss Major Warren off. Didn’t quite work, because it was looking over the body as close as he did that made Chris notice the rope burns on his neck.

He didn’t much like the feeling that twisted up in his stomach.

“That Southern boy danced prettier than Daisy herself did,” Major Warren leaned close, half-whispering in his ear.

Chris really hoped Major Warren wouldn’t go and notice him getting wood from that, from the pictures it conjured in him, Major Warren leaning on that rope with all his weight, coat flapping in the breeze, pulling over the slippery rope hand over leather-gloved hand.

He felt something sour curl in his stomach, liked he’d walked into a new level of the joke that maybe Major Warren himself wasn’t even aware of. Or—remembering the way he’d leaned his weight against the stable walling, pinning Chris in—maybe he was all too aware.

So Chris counted bill on top of bill into Major Warren’s hand, paying a black man for executing a white Southern man, a veritable brother-in-arms, for a list of sins not so very unlike Chris's own. There were a whole lot of things he could have done instead, some the law would have been more than willing to look the other way on, especially considering he was the law around here, but he didn’t do any of them.

“Pleasure working with you, sheriff."

“Oh, I’m sure it was,” Chris said tartly.

 

\---

 

That was the last Chris saw of him for a few weeks.

He had had a feeling Major Warren was coming back this way as soon as he’d seen the warrant for Johnny “Reb” Saddler, who’d run with a Texas militia some years back. Chris’s own daddy had spoken highly of him. But even without that knowledge he’d guessed Major Warren couldn’t pass that shit up. Judging by the look of him when the major cut him off his horse, stiff as a board, he’d gone out of his way for the fellow. Not that the Major himself showed any signs of exertion. His uniform looked as clean as it had the day he’d ridden out. Damn boots still shined.

Chris prodded the body with his toe when it was on the ground. “How many towns did you pass on your way to come see me, major?” he asked, making his voice all poisoned-honey sweet.

Major Warren just smiled, like he didn’t even care he was being called on his fucking transparency, like transparency was the whole fucking point. “Oh, just a couple.”

This one died with a blue face, and both fingerprints and rope burns around his neck. Chris straightened up when he saw that, maybe even jerked his hand back like he’d been burned.

“You ever heard of shooting these bastards?” Chris asked.

“Some mean bastards you need to hang. John Ruth was right about that much, even if we disagree on the exact time and place.”

Somehow the brazenness of it all drove him wild. That the major wasn’t the least little bit afraid of him, that he seemed to take for granted Chris Mannix wouldn’t strike back at him for the aggression. If anything, it had the funny, reason-defying effect of making Chris want to live up to the trust, stand up straighter. It was unnatural, feeling this hot and bothered from looking at the evidence of Major Warren killing men an awful lot like him. Still and all, Major Warren was killing them, and not him. Which had to mean something, show Chris was special in some way.

In the end, Chris just counted out the money, slapping it in Major Warren’s hand with a smile that felt a bit tight.

After he cleared out, Chris found himself upstairs, leaning up against the wall, pants down around his knees. He tried not to think of anything as he pumped his cock, but images kept flickering through his head of the Major killing, getting that pretty coat covered in some other man’s blood, placing calloused fingers around necks and choking the life out of them. That got him thinking about sturdy fingers against his own throat, two hands circled around his neck in the most intimate embrace anyone ever felt. About struggling to draw breath as they tightened up. And he tried not to picture any of that, tried to tell himself it was just the stress of the job and not getting laid recently that sent his mind to funny places. He almost believed it, but Chris weren’t no liar, not like the Major was, so it didn’t wholly take.

\---

The third time the Major came back, it was night.

Chris had come back from the local saloon. He’d broken up a fight between two of the orneriest drunks in town, and gotten a gash in the head and a black eye and ringing ears in the process. In the end, he’d arrested them both, because fuck it, Chris wasn’t in the mood to be magnanimous about drunken assholes hitting him in the head.

So when they were slumbering behind bars and Chris’s lone deputy had slunk off home, Chris went to the back room to wash his face off. He walked through the door to the little back room with a wash-basin and a desk.

Major Warren struck a match with the nail of his thumb just as Chris walked in. It lit up his whole face for a moment, eyes sly and amused, like he hadn’t just revealed himself to have been sitting in the dark waiting for Chris.

“Well, major. For a man who says Red Rock ain’t much of a town, you sure been around a lot.”

Major Warren was fixing him with a look he didn’t much like, watching Chris fill the washbasin with a fresh pitcher of water.

“It has its amusements. Got another body out back for you.”

“Oh? Who is it this time? Some second cousin of mine you rode out to South Carolina for?”

“Nah, some murdering cattle rustler I found camped out not two miles from here. Not doing your job, are you, Chris?”

He scowled, then bent his head down to wash the blood out of his hair. “I got two drunk assholes in the cells next door who will tell you otherwise, and I got the bruises to prove it.”

Major Warren got up. Bent over the washbasin, Chris could hear those boots and those damn spurs clinking across the floor, ringing out like silver. Stopping just short of Chris, the toes of his boots came into view out of the corner of his eye, all shiny and black. Major Warren just had that way about him. Like all the dirt and shit never did cling to him. Which was bullshit, because Chris knew exactly what kind of man he was.

But here Chris was, getting distracted by that little sliver of Major Warren’s boots in the periphery, as water dripped down his face into the bowl, the heat and nearness of the major’s body making him flush.

The Major clicked his tongue in faux concern. Chris kept his face down, scrubbing away at his face.

“Better let me take a look at that scrape for you, white boy,” Major Warren said, sounding as comforting as a scalpel blade. He’d have to be a damn fool to look up just then.

A warm hand slid through his hair, calloused and solid, his thumb inspecting him roughly, forcing his head to the side. Chris’s breathing thickened. Fingers worked their way through his hair casually, thumbnail scraping along the bloody gash on his head. It made Chris hiss a little.

Chris’s back was starting to ache from being forced in that bent-over-at-the-waist position for longer than was natural, and it made him want to shift his hips, just to readjust himself to where he could stand it longer, but he didn’t dare. Something told him Major Warren would take any such gesture entirely the wrong way. He still couldn’t see any part of the major but his boots, so he looked at those.

“You got a special interest in my boots there, Chris?”

“Just wondering how a man who rides through the fucking snow as much as you keeps them so clean.” He let the pad of Warren’s thumb roughly slide over his skin, the bruise on his cheek aching under his touch.

The other hand ran down to the nape of his neck, fingers curled in his hair, tightened, and pulled him up. Chris was dragged up into a standing position. He didn’t know what was wrong with him, letting himself get pushed around like this. The Major was still keeping up the pretense, stroking his thumb over the bruise forming on his cheek, forcing Chris’s face this way and that so he could get a better look at it. Then he looked down and frowned. “You’re bleeding all over my boots, Chris.”

Chris looked down, and the major was mostly full of shit, but technically, a drop of blood had indeed dripped down his chin and landed on the toe of Warren’s boot.

“My heart’s breaking for you, major.”

“You want to know how I keep my boots so clean, Chris?”

“How’s that?”

Major Warren tugged his fingers in his hair one more time, and Chris let himself be pushed down until he landed awkwardly on his knees.

“Go on, Chris. I think you can work out the rest.”

Chris stole a glance at the door, where those brawlers in their cells could have probably heard him, if they cared to. There was no telling what kind of clamor the Major would raise if Chris didn’t give him what he so evidently wanted. So it was to spare his own reputation and the town’s sensibilities, and not really for the Major at all, that he put his hands on the splintery-ass wooden floor and lowered his face to Major Warren’s shiny black boots. He breathed the smell of leather in as he tentatively rubbed his cheek against the side of his boot. He took a second to collect his nerves, then lowered his head, licked up the blood. He could feel himself make a face at the taste. It wasn’t anything a man could properly enjoy. But there was something about it—the copper of the blood, the salt of the leather—that mingled in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. The first flick of his tongue did it for cleaning up that little droplet of blood, but for some reason he gave the Major more, lowered his head and dragged his tongue around the curve of the leather, licked the spot where his blood had been a few more times.

Chris could feel the natural order of things struggling to reassert itself. This wasn’t right. None of it: not letting that uppity bastard live in the first place, nor letting him disrespect him, and certainly nothing about what he was doing now. Except it did feel natural, natural in some bone-deep way, like he’d been meant and marked out for this from the start, and it gave him a funny kind of vertigo to think on that.

He moved his head to the other boot without being told, and he was hard as rock by the time he was done. Raising his head to look up at the major, he could see he wasn’t alone there. Major Warren was looking down at him with a funny expression on his face, almost startled, like something about this had been more than what he expected.

That gave Chris a little boost of confidence to say, “That wasn’t really an answer to the original question, because like  _hell_ have you had boys doing this for you every time your boots get dirty.”

Major Warren’s eyes got a spark of something, surprise, maybe, like he really hadn’t expected Chris to mouth off and was pleased by it. “You got me. You’re pretty unique in doing that, Chris, so I guess the secret stays with me.”

Chris swallowed. Still on his knees, level with that tent in the major's pants; he got his fingers on the Major’s belt. He didn’t even question why he was doing what he was doing. It just seemed natural. And after all, the Major could have hollered, made himself overheard by the men in the cells if Chris displeased him. He really didn't have a choice, if he thought about it.

The Major nodded, pulled Chris into that fine, fresh-smelling wool, scratched his face up a bit as he forced his face against the wool of his trousers. He didn’t seem to care if he was fucking up Chris’s concentration, so Chris unbuttoned him slowly, achingly slow, just to prove there were consequences to fucking with him. Warren didn’t seem much to learn the lesson, though. Man like that never did seem to take the lessons the world’d been trying to teach him. That was the whole problem with the Major.

When Major Warren's fly was open, Chris looped his fingers on his waistband and worked his pants down, till they were down around his thighs and that clean white shirt was the only thing keeping him decent. Chris stared at that shirt, like as long as he didn’t disturb it he wouldn’t have crossed any lines that couldn’t be uncrossed. He breathed, and some part of him felt compelled to rub his cold, chapped hands together, till they were something resembling warm. Major Warren could have handled cold, he handled it a lot better than Chris himself did, but it just… seemed impolite somehow, to lay cold hands on the Major.

He brushed his now-warm hand under the major’s shirt and lifted it up, heart pounding, as he revealed the major’s cock, proud and already leaking. As much to block out that scandalizing sight as anything, Chris leaned forward and took him in his mouth.

He had thought on some level it would be strange, like the Major’s skin would feel as different from a white man’s as it looked, but that wasn’t so. His skin was softer than expected, and so warm it spread to Chris right away. Major Warren’s hand slid into his hair, proper encouragement, and Chris took a bit more of him in, trying to ignore the heat in his cheeks and the heat in his belly as he tried to figure out what the major liked. It wasn’t too hard, since when Chris did something that met with his disapproval, the Major scraped his nails along the gash in his forehead. That kind of disrespect should have made Chris hop up and walk away, but somehow it seemed a point of pride to continue at that point, prove he could get it right even to unreasonably exacting standards.

So he went on, the sheriff of Red Rock. On his knees in his own damn jail, in his own damn town, sucking a black man’s cock just a few feet from the town’s roughest constituents. Not that either he or the Major gave a damn about anyone Red Rock had to throw at them. They’d seen a hell of a lot worse. Done a lot worse too.

He whimpered a little as Major Warren’s fingers got in his bruises, making new ones on top of the old ones, like he was so damn full of himself he couldn’t even let a bruise go by on Chris’s skin without needing to color over it, claim it for himself.

He tried to do good, slurping and sucking and flicking his tongue, trying out rhythms until he found one he could tell, by the way Warren tightened one fist in his hair and one around his neck, was the right one, and then he settled into it, gave himself over to it, letting Warren’s cock hit the top of his mouth in a vicious staccato.

Major Warren was saying something—but it took him pulling out of his mouth altogether for Chris to register.

“You ain’t looking.”

Chris swayed on his knees, still feeling the burn of the Major’s fingers around his neck, eyes flickering up and down and away, spit and pre-come stiffening his mouth.

“You want me sucking it or looking at it?” he asked, feeling peevish and not liking how empty his mouth felt. “I can’t do both.”

A hand tightened on his neck, and the Major took his prick in his other hand and slapped Chris in the face with it a few times. Chris started to yelp, forgetting the men in the next room himself, but the hand shifted around to hold him by the throat and tightened, choked the cry right out of him. His cock hit the tender spot on his cheek, and even the gash on his forehead. Chris kept his eyes open through it all, though he winced plenty.

At last, the Major’d had his fill of slapping Chris in the face and when Chris got his mouth back on him again, he tasted his own blood on the tip of Major Warren’s cock, and something must have shown on his face, because Major Warren laughed at him, patted his cheek.

Chris glowered up at him with wide open eyes, but he went back to it, got back in the rhythm he’d found before, worked his tongue as cleverly as he knew how. He committed every hair and muscle twitch and scar to memory as he worked. When the Major came, he swallowed it all down, not thinking about how any of it looked to anyone else.

Chris was about half-out-of-his-mind with want by then, so he just slumped back on the floor and undid his own fly, eyes sliding mercifully shut. He felt the Major’s weight shift above him and the spurs clinked as they came down between his knees that he cracked an eye open. The major had put his foot between his legs, his toe just shy of Chris’s balls. Chris looked up at him, searching, then nodded. Too damn desperate to pretend he didn’t want it, and knowing the major wasn’t going to offer anything nicer than that, he scooted forward and got himself up against the major’s boot, trying to find the right angle, breathing thickly, and rutted up against him, his hips jerking desperately.

He didn’t even last a minute before he came in a shameful burst on the Major’s boots.

Chris looked up at the major, eyes real wide for him, and lowered his head and licked the mess up till his boots were clean again.

“See, I told you that’s how I keep them clean.” Major Warren’s voice was kinda tight, like he was out of breath himself, looking down at the sight. He reached and stroked Chris’s bruises one last time, then looked slightly puzzled, like he’d meant to do something else and had gotten sidetracked. Then he seemed to recover himself. “That’s a mighty fine spit shine, Chris,” he said. He put out a hand to help Chris up, and Chris took it.

“Your approval means the world to me, major.”

Chris levered himself to his feet and staggered back to the wash basin, scrubbed his face, tried to get the feel of spit and spunk off the corners of his mouth.

“I’ll see you around, next time I have a body for you,” the Major said, tipping his hat, and he walked out the door without another word.

\---

He came back a few more times, with similar results, and then he was gone a long time, and Chris almost thought someone’d finally gone and shot the bastard for good (or more likely, that he’d lost interest in Chris for good—even in his imagination, he couldn’t picture the Major dead at another man’s hands.) Then one evening when the moon was bright Major Warren came riding into town with a cart behind him, the entirety of the Jack Burnham gang behind him, a veritable social club of Southern raiders who’d tried to start over again out West as hired guns, all piled up like firewood in the back of the cart.

That had been the night of Red Rock's harvest dance. Chris remembered because he’d gotten himself scrubbed pink and freshly cologned for it, bought a new suit with a handsome green waistcoat, straightened his collar in the mirror, and then the door opened, Major Warren not even bothering to knock on his own personal chambers, just shoving open the door and leaning in the doorway.

The pretty lady Chris had promised the first dance to ended up waiting and waiting as Chris went down on his hands and knees on the floor of his room.

“Oh come on,” he said in dismay, his voice coming out all strangled. “You’ll put your mouth on me _there_ , but you won’t suck my cock?”

Major Warren ignored him, just slapped his ass a couple times like he was an unruly horse, and spread him wide to get his hot tongue on him again, licking him in broad slow strokes that drove Chris wild, feeling the Major’s beard scratching up his balls and the soft underside of his ass. He felt the cold as Warren came up off him, winced as the Major slapped him again.

“That's right. Cause I ain't interested in your prick, and you wouldn't deserve having it tended to even if I was.”

“You sure are interested in this then—ah, ah, _ahhh_. Goddamn you.”

He arched his back up and whimpered, straining his legs to stretch them further apart. The major’s rough, warm fingers dug into his asscheeks, forced him wider as his tongue worked his hole.

He got his hand on Chris’s prick, and jerked it, and Chris almost felt relief as he spilled on the Major's hand, except he knew what came next. How the Major gathered up his spilt spunk and slicked himself up with it, slid inside Chris just as the band outside hit a break in the program, and the room filled with the sound of their heavy breathing, creaking floorboards and creaking knees and bodies slapping together.

There was something wrong with him, he thought. This town was full of folks who liked him well enough, pretty ladies included. But he was ignoring all of them to get on his knees for a murderous black bastard who still sometimes looked at him like Chris was worse than him. It wasn’t anything he should have liked, but there was something to knowing it was _him_ that the Major had crossed mountains and rivers to deliver those gaunt-faced raggedy-clothed motherfuckers to. A twisted sort of gift, but a gift nonetheless. There was something about Major Warren’s attention, Major Warren’s thoughts being on him even out there that made every word Chris had ever talked about dignity and honor in defeat seem like so much bullshit.

Afterwards, Chris did up the shiny buttons on the Major’s coat without being told.

“You want to come downstairs with me, major? The drinks are free.”

Warren raised his eyebrows. Major Warren never stuck around, just brought in the bodies, took the money, and then pushed Chris up against the wall or the window or the table that marked the only furniture in Chris’s personal quarters, and made it quick. When he left, Chris went about his business, tried to ignore the ache in his jaw or the wince in his step.

It wasn’t that Chris really wanted the bastard to hang around, but he knew that Major Warren wanted to get out the door, so he took special pleasure in dragging things out, making conversation, that was all.

Warren looked at him, kind of lingeringly, and though he didn’t stick around for the dance, he did split a bottle of whiskey with him before he went back out on the road. That was something.

 

\---

 

The next time wasn’t like any of the other times.

Chris woke up to banging on the back door. That was nothing new, in his line of work. He pulled his boots on over his long johns and fastened on his holster, just in case, and went downstairs. What was new was finding Major Warren at the back door, looking disheveled, something Chris hadn’t seen since the night they’d nearly died together, and then only after he’d been shot. Chris could see a body on his horse behind him, but the Major wasn’t looking smug this time. In fact, he was leaning against the door, with a hand clutched to his shoulder.

“What happened to you?” Chris asked, reaching out a hand to steady him without thinking.

“Sonofabitch bit me.”

“ _Bit_  you?”

"That's what I said." The Major pushed past him, and Chris followed him inside.

“Who? That dead feller out there?”

“That’s right, and you better believe I took pleasure in killing him slowly for it.” The Major rummaged through the cabinet above the washbasin in Chris’s room, pulling down gauze and bandages and shit.

He felt like he should have felt smug—the Major stirring up nests of old Confederates like fire ants like he was, it wasn’t too surprising one of them bit, even if he wouldn’t have expected it to be in quite such a literal manner. He didn’t think too much about why the Major had come here now, when he was wounded and not even thinking of rubbing Chris’s face in another dead bounty.

The Major shrugged his coat off, then peered down at the shoulder of his white shirt, where they could both see the beginnings of blood seeping through. “Goddamn. Look and see if it got on my coat.”

Chris reached for the coat without thinking, then stopped. “Think maybe your shoulder’s more important than the coat,” he said, doubtfully. Then added, “Don’t worry, I’ve had to patch folks up from worse. Hell, I’ve patched you up through worse.”

“Just once, I’d like to come back here without you reminding me of that."

“Well if that’s the worse thing that happens every time you drop by, then you’re getting off easier than I do when you’re in town.”

Little flicker of amusement there.

He remembered just how much care the Major had shown him in this room, the first night they’d crossed the line, how little concern he had shown Chris’s injuries then. In light of that, it felt funny, being so careful with the Major now. He peeled the shirt off him, and peered at the injury. “That ain’t too bad. Little whiskey in there, bandage it up, you should be all right, assuming he wasn’t rabid or something.”

Major Warren took a drink of whiskey, then passed it back to Chris. He didn’t seem to have any hesitation about letting himself be patched up by Chris. Not that he should have. After everything Chris had gone through getting him down the mountain from Minnie’s, he considered it a point of pride that the Major wasn’t going to succumb to some dead man’s teeth now. So he worked, poured the whiskey on him, got him bandaged up real good. It occurred to him he’d never seen the major before like this, with his shirt off, from behind. Usually, it’d have been the other way around.

So it was the first time he saw all the scars. Five stripes drawn in a vicious arc across one shoulder, like claw marks from some animal. Knife wound between his ribs too, a few long strap-marks criss-crossing his back that he didn’t much want to linger on, and a fair few others whose provenance wasn’t so easy to guess at.

Chris tore his eyes away, and went back to bandaging him. Those scars kept drawing his eyes back, though. Like most things about the Major's past, he supposed he'd known about them, but hadn't really thought about them. Even though Chris'd stroked the Major's bullet scar from Minnie's on more than one occasion, it was still hard to think of the Major as being so marked up by the past, that his body didn't wash as clean as his boots or his uniform. It left Chris feeling foolish, and contemplative.

After he was finished, and they both had split the rest of the whiskey, Chris got down on his knees, drew out the Major's cock and sucked him off soft and slow. The Major must have been feeling tender too, cause he didn’t push Chris around too much, just put a hand under his jaw and held him there, hand firm around his neck but not choking him too much. Then they did tighten up as he neared the end, and that was alright too. More than alright.

Afterward, Chris got back up on the bed behind him, while the Major laid down on his side. He ran his fingertips along the knife wound at his ribs, then put his lips there. He expected to get pushed off, or worse, and was surprised that it didn’t come. He could feel the Major’s breath catch in his throat a little. Major Warren was a hard man to wring those little sighs of satisfaction out of—tight-fisted as a miser with praise he was—so, Chris had to be extra generous just to make up for his stinginess. And tonight at least, it seemed to be paying off.

“You should stay the night. Just to make sure,” Chris said softly. "You can deal with the bounty in the morning."

It seemed like a rare treat, to see the Major without his uniform, and he intended to rake his eyes over every inch of him for as long as he allowed it. He flicked his tongue out to his uninjured shoulder, licked one of the arcing stripes that might have been from a bear, might have been from a mountain lion. He found he didn’t even much care how many dead Southern criminals the major cared to bring him going forward, if he’d get to do this again.

“God damn it. Just like your mouth on me too much, don’t you?”

The good thing about having his tongue otherwise occupied is he didn’t have to respond to that. Chris guessed he’d gone off the rails the minute he'd taken that gun out of Major Warren’s holster, and much as it felt like Warren’d bewitched him in some vague and indefinable way, he supposed he’d let himself get bewitched.

It was just loyalty, was all. All that strange, blood-drenched loyalty that was owed a man he’d killed with and nearly died with. And it was the funny fact of loyalty like that that it sometimes required a man to reconsider old loyalties. See them cast in a new and not-entirely flattering light.

And he leaned his cheek against the major’s back and said some of that, about him not caring so much about all those dead bastards, who were dead, after all, and not worth Chris's worry any way. It wasn't like it was still the war now.

“You really want to be reminding me of the war now, boy?”

Chris smiled against his skin. “Well, sure, major. If a Union man did this for you,” he drew his tongue down one of the mysterious scars, old and faded, along his shoulder blade, “You wouldn't like it as much.”

“I don't think there's any man in either camp who'd do what you do. Most men have some pride.”

Chris nuzzled between his shoulder blades, touched him slower, kissed him there, which was about all you could do with him. Counter bad manners with good. “Most men don't know how good you taste.”

Major Warren half-turned, looking nonplussed by that, which Chris counted as a win. Major Warren didn't seem to think he had it in him to be sweet talked by anyone, least of all Chris, but sometimes there was a look in his eyes, like he was startled into seeing Chris for the first time.

“I suppose that dead man will keep till morning.”

Chris would take his victories where he could get them.


End file.
